In: British Journal of Phenomenology. 30/1 (January 1999): 106-124.

The Philosophy of the Question

With his most famous question, the Being-question, the Seinsfrage — a question essentially and not incidentally obliterated by the tradition of philosophic questioning, Heidegger proposes a phenomenology of questioning. This is not counter to the project of philosophy but it calls us to our own experience as questioners, even as those who ask, who can ask 'Why the why.'(1) For Heidegger, 'only because man is in this way, can he and must he, in each case, say, not only yes or no, but essentially yes and no.'(2)

A reflection on inquiry as such poses the interpretive question of the question. In this way, Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology in Being and Time determines the point of departure for any inquiry as the prerequisite, orientation and anticipatory process or progression towards any possible fulfilled terminus. Heidegger's later question concerning technology is inaugurated in the same way with careful attention to the destiny of the question as a project and a possibility for thought.

But Heidegger's concern with technology is itself 'questionable' for ordinary philosophers of technology. After all, it seems patent that Heidegger is the anti-technological philosopher par excellence. Thus Heidegger's questioning concern with technology and science, sustained throughout Heidegger's life as the double to the Being-question, is routinely heard as a 'negative' account of technology, that is as a critically antagonistic and nostalgic assault against the modern technical world. This negative appraisal of Heidegger's thought is not a weakness on the part of Heidegger's readers and critics. Rather the questions concerning technology and Being-question have to be heard in such a negating, critical fashion. That is, as long as we fail to ask the question of the question.

In what follows I attempt to reflect upon the case, the question of the question after technology. Heidegger's phenomenology of questioning is important here because, I shall seek to show, the contemporary expression of technology condemns questioning to nothing more than a calculative convention (namely that of question and answer) rather than an open- ended or attentive project. Calculative questioning challenges and is content with nothing less than the satisfaction of the correct. It is the calculative character of the contemporary techno-scientific world which renders the questionable as such less and less question-worthy. Calculating technological questioning is revealed as a Ge-stell — hyphenated to emphasize the enframing of modern technology as a set-up. This framing set up is the secret of technology (as the age of the world picture), the quantitative expression, that is the earmark of information-age technicism or what Heidegger called 'Americanism,' i.e., 'European' (see WP153; cf 135). Thus the achievements of modern technological advance depend upon calculable manipulation which in his day, Heidegger named 'cybernetics.' The danger here is that 'what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, seemingly incalculable. The invisible shadow cast by this conviction is the result of the ascendency of man as subiectum' (WP 136). Technological potential is apparently infinite but the sacrifice of unimaginable infinity to the imaginary ideal of mathematical infinity is a token of what Heidegger calls aletheia.

Beyond the technological dreams of infinite calculation, the question of the question refers to the doubly-turned or yoked nature of questioning.(3) In Being and Time Heidegger writes, 'Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction from what is sought.' But the way inquiry takes direction can vary. What is sought can be interrogated by the question or what is sought can be attended to in the question. Attentive questioning attends both to what is asked as what is asked about what is asked and listens to that which is sought by the question. This last is also the piety — the poetry — of thought, a movement of thinking that is almost Eastern in aspect if not origin. The responding attentiveness of creative questioning (or authentic, genuine reflection or thought) directed to the sense of things — Heidegger invokes in his 1954 essay, 'Wissenschaft und Bessinnung,' such responsive questioning forgets itself as questioning and as it loses 'the character of questioning,' becomes in the end 'simply saying.'(4)

The danger of mistaking the aletheic character of truth, regarding it as no more than what is correctly revealed by the enframing constraint or rule of modern technology (Ge-stell) is the danger that questioning will become no more than investigative inquiry. As the open adventure of thought that is the essence of questioning, before but especially after technology what is thereby endangered is the aletheic essence of truth.

Heidegger's own questioning in the wake of technology is a question set into the set up or setting upon that is the essence of modern technology or das Ge-stell. 'This incalculable can be safeguarded into its truth — only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection' (WP 136). The working effect of such creative questioning questions into the framework or set up of technology. Such a query must be 'safeguarded' or sheltered as the kind of subordinate questioning most at risk in the wake of the instrumental thinking of technology. This is the oblivion of technology: 'in this situation total forgotteness of being reigns, total concealment of being.' Stilted by our culture of technique and invention, we are anything but masters, we are not the originators or disposers of technology, but in this framed relation to technology, humanity is subordinated to technology, becoming , in Heidegger's words, 'its toy.' As Jean Ladrière argues, the technological scheme or logos 'becomes an exterior power' imposing 'its own law on humanity.'(5) This is not a an ontologically clouded variation on a Luddite theme but a phenomenologically articulated, existentially and pragmatically confirmable commonplace. To use any technological item, even simple machines like a lever or a wedge, the user must conform, i.e., the user must attune him or herself to the tool as such in order to use the tool as such — and not the other way around. This is the hypothetical imperative of technology. If you want to surf the Internet (if you want to ride a motorbike), you must do so within the limits of the Internet including your particular provider/browser (motorbike) you happen to be using. Other tricks may or may not work: convergence or coincidence with the specific protocol determining success in every case. This rule of adaptation to the demands of the tool and the exigency of the task to be done is skill; it is the result of study or receptive, affine use.

Holding a hammer properly enables one to use the hammer to accomplish what one has to do with the hammer. But this is other than bending the hammer to one's own will. The hammer will do best what one will if one conforms one's use to the intrinsic design of the hammer, heft, shape, etc. (conformity with respect to the appropriate grip, the angle and arc of the swinging stroke, even the kind of nail employed, surely the position of the same). In the case of hammering, there is always a great bit of freedom -- one can use the side of the hammer's head or the shaft for hammering, if it is a claw hammer and one is a performance artist, say, one can use the sharp edge of the claw. But even here the condition of the range of use is 'decided' or constrained by the tool and the task even in the last unlikely because (not albeit) unwieldy case. This is what Heidegger in Being and Time referred to as equipmental totality (SZ 68). With more sophisticated machines, anything mechanically driven for example, especially all things electronic, the range of play is increasingly reduced.

Thus engaged on the terms of our tools in order to use them as our tools, we accomodate ourselves to the law of the techno-cybernetic world, harnessing our patience and our desire to the numbing constraints of modern technology, on the telephone, on the road, where the most ubiquitous example of modern technological constraint or fascination is cybernetic captivation, matched to the software and hardware limitations of our computer world, on line, on the Internet, on the Web. In Heidegger's words, again, we are the 'plaything' of our own technology, and once again: not the other way around. It is common to protest against Heidegger's esotericism when we hear him speak of technology, especially the technology of logic, the organon of Western rationality, as if it were imposing its law on us, playing with us. The idea is as paradoxical as anything that calls for thought or may be named question-worthy. Obviously too, we also hear this expression as mysterious or esoteric or even mystical because of Heidegger's style, his language. Where language is the technology of academic discourse, the rhetorical tool of the philosopher and the sophist, language is also the technology of science and reflection, poetizing and thinking. It is in this same alienating/alienated way that we become, in Thoreau's more direct formula: 'the tools of our tools.'

As the plaything of technology, fashioned in turn by what we make, we are ourselves transformed into the instruments of our own technologies, information and otherwise. Indeed, one way to regard modern humanity is as the practical and literal means of technology today: that is as the agency of all technological reproduction, mechanical reproduction and electronic reproduction. Regarding the historical essence of technology, we ourselves — to use Joan Stambaugh's pragmatic translation of Ge-stell — have been been 'framed' by what in Heidegger's image, 'frames' us.

In Nordic mythology, Odin's two ravens had powers embodying the technological dreams of the Western soul, as barbarian as civilized. To inform the All-Father, they moved at the speed of thought. And Odin was a god, as Oedipus was a man, who paid a consummate price — but in Odin's case, deliberately and with an eye enough — for knowledge. But in a world of multifarious heritage and influence, we are not quite Odin's children. Born according to one Greek myth, from a mixture of dust and titan's blood we have more in common with Prometheus who also carried the same promise of instant wish, will, and fulfillment in his own name but was condemned to endure the desolation of the failure of technology, as this failure testifies to what Reiner Schürmann calls the tragic condition of Being, what Heidegger names its withdrawal, we dare immediate fulfillment, like Prometheus, in violation of all measure. Our reward, like Sisyphus's perfect justice, is desire without end. Here, it is also instructive that even a storyteller like Camus remembered only Sisyphus's eternal destiny and not his original offense. In truth, Sisyphus was punished for a crime various or trivial, absorption with life, with immortality. But this is an absorption like Tantalus's and so Sisyphus, like Ixion was punished prematurely, before he could commit the crime. Both were guilty of nothing more than embracing a phantasm. Sisyphus fate was to play the work of time, the work of life, replaying the same round: infinitely rendered, impossibly accomplished. Sisyphus won desire to infinity: as soon consummated, as soon undone. That is: frustrated, ungratified, a pursuit as eternal as Keats's own illusions.

The mischief of non-consummation, the human plague, is the numbing constraint of technology and science, whereby the question of essence as Heidegger poses it, taking a metaphor from the poet Stefan George, is the question of what frames us. This frame is the traditional question of love and freedom. And it is the same traditional romanticism that captures the enduring allure of the efficient technical mind. The same ideal of love and freedom betrays the history of the tradition and practice of magic and alchemy which (Nietzsche argues) functions as the paradigm and secret motivation for the whole of modern science and technology. If questioning has become insipid in the wake of technology or else in the placidity of the thoughtlessness of Western reason, we need to ask Heidegger's question once again. We do this not by questioning technology but by questioning questioning in the wake of technology.

In the scientific schematism that condenses every causality to a singular nexus, stripping the metaphysical and first, final, and fetishistic material causes, we have re-made, reworked (if in a thoroughly Roman or imperalist image) the causa efficiens. And yet only the causa efficiens, as a practical technoscientific observer might claim, only one out of the original quartet, was ever 'really' able to cause anything in the first place. This conviction is the scientistic myth of simple causality. In truth, in the round, real world, there is no such identifiably singular efficient cause, separable from the manifold interplay of the causal dynamic. The actual causal nexus is the chaotic interrelatedness of real events and processes: selectively, deceptively simplifiable, overdetermined from the start, in a chain of conditions and related qualifications. And every detail works its ultimate consequence, as Nietzsche would say, by necessity.

We do not simply accomodate ourselves to our technologies but we confine or limit our desires and so ourselves to them. What can be done becomes exemplary, worth doing, the only thing to do. From a phenomenological perspective, once again, we become our tools, project ourselves into and then, mirabile dictu, as Nietzsche liked to tease, we find ourselves in our things. Like the internet, like TV or MTV, but also like everything registered and so liable as stock, as reserve, technology becomes as resource the veritable mirror of our souls, insidiously benign like books or CDs, much more dangerously, in the illusory practice of writing in electronic media like email, or now reflecting our bodies in the idea of the genetic code, our "genes" that make us who we are. Beyond the negative threats of chemical plants and their waste, like nuclear powerplants and nuclear accelerators, like the plastic promise of contemporary cosmetic surgery, it is the ambition of the human genome project and the practical affair that is the cloning of an adult sheep that we ourselves are literally not metaphorically to be tooled by our tools.

This subjective fashioning is what it means to say that we are our tools. Clothes make the man (evidence of humanity: the first technology). If we are our mountain boots or our sandals, our choice of business suit or evening dress, we are also our hammers or indeed: we are our CD players, our computers, even our coffee-makers. And so it goes with tools, with cities and roads, with the communicational infrastructure of contemporary life in cellular and car phones (the latter providing social evidence of prime importance: the ultimate technology). In all these things, typically not exceptionally, the automobile exemplifies modern technological life. We do not need to speak of planes (though the example works far beyond Heidegger's 'waiting' plane on the runway) to see the backwards fashioning or working of the tool upon the user, the maker, the driver, the consumer. We recall the phenomenologically confirmable commonplace that a driver can and does become his automobile — "extended" as the Husserlian cum Heideggerian analysis of the dynamic of motoring through narrow streets or on the open road, with power magnifying the force of the body, speed beyond any possible evolutionary anticipation, but a power controlled by the ordinary motorist and grand prix racer alike with delicacy, deliberate speed. But as Buadrillard has emphasised, we are both extended and restricted by the automobile. We go as fast the speed limit and police constraints permit. We go as fast as the economics of consumption allows but we also go as fast as the car itself, as the design of the road permits us to go. We are, we answer, the claim of the road. And in America this claim is sheer fantasy, a matter of the wide open spaces of the American West and the American Past: Chevy, T-Bird, Trans-Am. In Germany, to choose another land marked by its identification with the automobile, the claim and the fantasy are on more equal terms. For Germany, this fantasy has a different provenance and a different expression together with a different set of limitations. The Autobahn and the Mercedes were made for each other. The German motorist answers this complementary configuration of technical track permitting maximum speed and, for the most part, avoids the leftmost lane unless his own automobile makes it possible to ride down other knights of the open road: lights flashing, horns sounding, a jousting tailored for the streamlined, uni-directional vectors of the modern not the medieval era.

Not is it an accident that Germany shares its advertising preoccupations with the automodile with the North American public. Beyond speed, the erotics of the motor car "extend" us even more. This is not simply a matter of postmodern car crash fantasies. The feel of car works on the every day level and the more we are impressed by the design, the more able we are to drive the car like a second skin and this extension is more important than image. We can become via an exact bodily feel, the very edge of the automotive fender, in just the way Alphonso Lingis(6) describes this very visceral, sensual extension of the driver's car, or more prosaically, beyond Lingis's overt sexual metonymy, just in the way that Patrick Heelan's philosophy of (technologized or phenomenologically hermeneutic) perception(7) or Don Ihde's account of technological extension has it:(8) we are embodied indwelling beings, we are as Heidegger says, and here is the spacial crux of all technological revealing, in the world. And we speak of extended things and the talk of extended things as inaugurating modernity because we can extend ourselves, because we are inherently, quintessentially intentional beings, ahead of ourselves, beyond ourselves. Merleau-Ponty's account of the blindman's cane expresses the considerable versatility of intentional being in the world alongside and with the ultimately aesthetic or creative use of whatever may be to hand, be it a cane, an automobile, eyeglasses, telescopes, paintbrushes, or, for a teenager the electronic 'feel' and hype of surfing the Internet late at night, where in such web-dreams the computer screen absorbs the ever more Platonized images of adolescent fantasy and the Aristotelian desire to know.

In this context, we recall that for Heidegger well before this became common knowledge, cybernetics is named the 'ersatz for philosophy and poetry.'(9) In an age of virtual reality, it is important to remember that that all cybernetics, all computer or information technology is always, is essentially ersatz, i.e., unreal or virtual.

Techne:

The Constraint of Technoscientific Culture and Art as the Saving Freedom

The first emphatic word in Heidegger's Die Frage nach der Technik highlights not technology, its how, its about, or wherefore, but questioning. This for Heidegger is because 'Questioning builds a way.'(10) What is to be built by way of questioning is extraordinary, if in the midst of Heidegger's many remarkable claims, often too little analysed if routinely remarked upon. The way is a way of freedom, an opening toward a relationship to essence of technology. Heidegger's project of 'questioning concerning technology' seeks 'to prepare a free relationship' to technology, where the freedom of this relationship of human existence to technology is determined in terms of response to the 'essence' of technology. Heidegger's brief is not against technology. He speaks in the name of liberation but not mastery.

Because 'technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology,' that is, because the essence of technology is nothing technological, the free or open relationship of human existence to technology is not a matter of the technical facility or experience with technology so often invoked by commentators arguing against or on behalf of Heidegger's analysis of the technological essence of modernity. Nor it is a mater of detachment, Gelassenheit alone. This in turn means that any neutral perspective on technology is a convicted relationship to technology, just as being for or against technology is an entrapment within the technological setup.

By means of the anti-adjectival definition of essence ordinary enough in Heidegger, it is because 'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological' and not because of our philosophical thickness that we remain barred from experiencing 'our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it' (Q 4). In other words, we are excluded from anything like a relationship to the essence of technology exactly when we conceive technology as the technological.

To articulate his project of questioning within the framing constraint of technoscience, Heidegger invokes a backwards and forwards dynamic. Questioning the usual adjectival force of essence as whatness, quiddity reveals the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology as manifestly related terms: to ' posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity' (4) poised, as the instrumental always is in anthropocentric terms.

In this questioning of technology, the instrumental and anthropological definitions, and the observation that the one entails the other, are not denied. They are as Heidegger says 'correct.' For Heidegger the instrumental definition is anthropological. It defines both technology and, as homo faber, the human being. This in turn locks us into the defining problem of our age, which is now no longer if it ever was, How does it stand with being, but rather How does it stand with technology? And like the being question, this question can be parsed in many ways.

Heidegger weaves technology in its essence into the original meaning of the ancient Greek word for 'art' in all its breadth: techne referring to 'the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts'(13). As art, as techne, technology is at least potentially, that is, from its origins, poietic. Recalling the likewise coordinate sense of techne and episteme, Heidegger claims that 'technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth happens' (13).

But exactly this definition of technology seems counter-intuitive, to say the very least. As many of Heidegger's critics have noted: it seems to ignore the many different aspects and experiences of contemporary technology. If we are pleased to think of Heidegger's thought as a species of (to follow one commentator's colloquialisation) 'pine tree mysticism,' this is surely pine tree pretentiousness. How does the aletheiological event of technology enable us to understand our relationship to technology?

Heidegger expresses the essence of modern technology as what he names a challenging-forth or challenging-revealing. This challenging sets upon what is, nature, the genetic profile of the individual human being, the graphic imagination of the human relationship to the cybernetic domain, and so on and reveals it on the terms of that same technical challenge or set up. For a farmer with a a plow what there is are fields of earth to be cultivated; for a farmer at war, what a plow always retains is the aspect of matter beyond form: raw materials for a sword. This is not opposed to the determination of a plow for plowing, it is because (i.e., the how) of that determination. For the genome project, what there is what counts as the makeup of the human being, mind and body/body and soul, there will be assayable, measureable nucleotide sequences.

The contrast to challenging forth is the contrast Heidegger suggests between the care of husbandry and challenge of technological control or domination. The game is the same: agriculture. In the latter case we can speak of forbearance because, to use Heidegger's much maligned black forest imagery, the saw mill on the river is a tool to turn the flow of the river into the turning of a wheel for human advantage and appropriation. There is or better: there has to be forbearance or restraint to the extent that without great care for the flow and force of the river, its bends, its banks, depths, recent meteorological history, the saw mill cannot function. The sheer will to power of the woodcutter, his ambition, his dreams of rapacity, as some philosophers of technology have observed to be more rather than less characteristic of the users of pristine or early forms of technology are all irrelevant. The technological condition or hypothetical imperative of technology means that in premodern times the only way to realize such ambitions is to husband one's energies to the limits of the river and to reflect that same care in the design and operation of the saw mill. The hydroelectric dam, on the other hand, forces the question for once and for all. The scope of the river is altered, dammed into the requisite domain and so dammed, the challenging of the hydroelectric plant reveals the river in terms not of its history or its contours or what lies upstream, but eliminating all that, as hydroelectric source. Here one misses the point if all one sees is the quaint image of the oldfashioned water mill in a nostalgic contrast with the modern advances of hydroelectric power. Rather Heidegger offers a reflection on the difference between modern technology and premodern technology in the way this difference yet reflects the essence of technology

In the related case of agriculture, Heidegger traces the transformation into modern agribusiness as the transformation into the rule of modern method and technique, the radicality of his claim is that the farmer as well as the farm and the farmed are thereby transformed. So it goes with sheep-farming. Formerly, Heidegger notes, to cultivate and to set in order 'meant to take care of and to maintain' (14-15). An entirely different ideal rules in mechanized or 'factory' efficient farming. Rather than the ambiguities of stewardship however close to dominion in a patriarchical scheme, we have an undisguisedly brutal, patently and shockingly efficient industrial enterprise. The earth no longer gives or withholds anything. Thus there is no need to thank the earth or the gods for nature's bounty: that would be true nostalgia and superstition. Today modern means guarantee crop yields.

It is easy to overlook the economic engine that leads to the biological jackpot that culminates in the Human Genome project.(11) But it is to this effect that Heidegger argues that 'Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry' (15). The recent cloning of an adult sheep near Rosslyn in Scotland helps to recall the force of Heidegger's original insight into the issue of the mechanization of nature and the calculation of life itself beyond what remains the horribly cathected resonances of the full quotation:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. (GA 79, p. 27.)

It is important to emphasise in this context that the political force of the historical associations inevitably entangled in this statement — the anger that can still be elicited by the implications of such a statement on the part of a defeated opponent — means that few readers are inclined to see what Heidegger is arguing. Victors still in a war more than half a century cold, we are outraged interpreters of the range of things Heidegger ought to have said. In the previous example, the politicized moral confidence of a Caputo(12) or course, of Levinas himself, can persuade us that such a Heideggerian reduction to the 'same' must miss the point thoroughly and completely, that equations such as these betray the excesses of Heidegger's own rhetoric and a failure of philosophic insight.(13) As critics, we evaluate Heidegger as thinker of the ethical above all, and find him morally lacking.(14) This same evaluative, calculative passion is what it means to be ourselves caught in the draft of the Ge-stell or the constructions of modern technology. According to measuring, evaluative, moral fashion, Heideggers's Ackerbau image has everything to do with Heidegger (and Nazism) and nothing to do with technology and nothing to do with us. Neglecting what Heidegger means when he says 'the same,' 'das Selbe,  we stubbornly maintain in the indignation of blindness that that there is nothing the same in the cadence of the examples sequenced in Heidegger's comparisons. Technology, according to its instrumental, humanist ideal, is neutral. Thus nuclear energy can destroy or else it can yield life. Recoiling from Heidegger's comparisons, deploring his associations as outrageous, condemning his lack of taste, his crassness, we stubbornly refuse to connect agriculture, however modernized and bio-technized (which it has been for quite some time, especially and rather dramatically in the USA: land of no-holds-barred capital opportunism), with the enduringly horrible phenomena of gas chambers and death camps. We will not see anything 'the same' in the 'manufacture of corpses' and the meat processing industry, which last includes and which was in fact the motor of the experimental procedure of cloning as an advantage or progressive improvement over even such a mechanical means of reproduction as artificial insemination.

For Heidegger, the key, and this is, alas — and I cannot emphasise that alas too keenly or too much — unchanged, it is the same, in the example of (say) organ reserves grown in cloned organisms to be harvested as a reserve, a stockpile, for projected needed transplant possibilities. What sets upon and challenges forth the dynamic force of nature is what Heidegger calls a twofold Fordern, an expediting, a summoning, calling forth, a compelling. That is also, for Heidegger, 'the revealing that rules throughout modern technology' (16). What we want in good English is to force nature, like a bonsai tree or the English gardener's art that is the garden itself: botanical presentation, maze, topiary. This is what is desired and this is what we do: driven to secure 'the maximum yield at the minimum expense' (15). This is the modern meaning of efficiency: technology as causa efficiens.

But 'because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing' (18), Heidegger finds a saving or better, more accurately said: a twisting power. To assert that the human being is "challenged" into the process of ordering, "taking part in ordering" seems to be a mere subjectivism, like the voluntarist understanding of technology as the will to dominion which Heidegger claims to find in Nietzsche. But such a reading would overlook the aletheiological in Heidegger's account of revealing: 'unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as subject relates to an object' (18).

In this first exposition of a possible saving dimension, 'we need not look far' but only 'apprehend in an unbiased way That which has already claimed man and has done so, so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed' (18). In everything that we do authentically, one could say, without violence to Heidegger I or II, we find ourselves 'already brought into the unconcealed.' Heidegger is famous for the passivity this entails (as this is further articulated in 'The Turn,' or in Gelassenheit, or in the infamous Spiegel interview, 'Only a God Can Save Us'). But what Heidegger intends here is merely an articulation of the aletheiological character of truth. 'When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it' (19).

Answering the claim of unconcealment, the key difference to be thought between the scientific method of questioning or reseach and the way of thoughtful questioning is the responding claim of unconcealment: the difference between the calculated or inauthentic, investigative question (ordered in advance to a pre-scribed or expected answer), and attentive, reflective or responsive questioning attuned to that which is to be questioned, just where the ordering intentionality of questioning as such can obstruct — in every stiff-necked way — the advance of thinking. Scientific questioning is exactly not the questioning that Heidegger names the piety of thought. And if that latter questioning does not turn of itself into simply saying that is only because the difference between thinkers and poets is made of the simplicity that by its nature (and to the mischance of thinking), yields only to the poet.

For Heidegger, the kind of answer sought by reflective questioning responds in 'the sense of correspond[ing] to the essence of what is being asked about' (23). Rather than the monological order of question and answer, this is the dialogical attention that for Heidegger is already given to us at the heart of intentionality. Heidegger's subtle claim that 'we need only apprehend in an unbiased way' is a coordinate reference.

Kant was able to express the decisive achievement of modern science as exactly scientific questioning (KdrV xiii). This is a questioning set up in advance, ordered to a particular answer (the question-answer style characteristic of scientific questioning is always anything but open). For Heidegger, the very technological order of science begins in theory.(15) Even particle physics, the most advanced and radical bastion of science is bound to this style of scientific and not reflective or thoughtful questioning. Even in the exactly paradoxical realm of quantum mechanical indeterminacy 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and ... remains orderable as a system of information' (23).

For Heidegger and recent critical reflections in the philosophy of technology increasingly share this perspective, if they do not attribute the insight to Heidegger, it is plain that the traditional theoretical distinction between pure science and applied science or technology is erroneous. Representing modern technology as applied physical science (and the advocates of strong public support for basic science make this identification with all calculated rhetorical intent)(16) is an illusion which dissipates in the wake of questioning into the essence of modern technology and the essential origins of modern science (23).

The danger Heidegger speaks of is not singular but a multifarious danger — that man might come to take the character of ordering for the essence of unconcealment — 'thus endangered out of destining' (26). The danger is that reducing the real to nothing more than standing reserve, humanity can lose the world of things that are not merely the products or resources of technology. What is at risk is not the possibility of such a reduction but the truth of what is. The danger too is that this ordering as standing reserve can come to include human beings as a resource, to be managed — the very vision experimental practice shows to be uncomfortably non-metaphorical. What is in danger thereby is not its contrary but rather its corollary: man 'exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.' At the end of the day, there is nothing but subjective, idealised humanity: nature is revealed as anthropomorphized construct; deities are demythologized as anthropomorphic projections; the dark night of the soul corresponds to Dickensian bits of beef, Freudian frivolity covered over with shame. At risk is the doubly simple, truth as aletheia.

The danger of modern technology 'threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing...' (T 28)

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

This too accords with the backwards and forwards chiaroscuro or shadowplay of aletheic truth. 'Gestell cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth' (28).

It is because the set up, Ge-stell or 'Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth' that the human being risks the loss of 'a more primordial revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth' (28). The refusal of aletheic truth in the monological ideal of truth as correspondence as well as the concealment intrinsic to aletheic truth 'is danger in the highest sense' (ibid.).

As disclosedness and as a Being-towards uncovered entities, Dasein is essentially 'in the truth.' We recall that as an existentiale such a being 'in the truth' entails both the possibility of disclosing or covering things over. The poetic force of Heidegger's expression of the denial of truth's own denial, 'where danger is, grows the saving power' is borrowed from the poet Hölderlin. But the same structure Heidegger also takes fom Nietzsche to express the world of concern as it grows around and reflects the creative dynamic of life: the transmogrification of the heroic: tragic, the demigodly: saytr-play, and — still working backwards — the divine sphere: — 'to what? "world" perhaps?'(17) Elsewhere I discuss this paratactic scheme as Heidegger's lyric.(18) It is the plain and centred leitmotif of much of Heidegger's latter thought, following Nietzsche, with echoes and resonances to Wagner and to music which Heidegger obliquely diminishes by way of emphasis or distraction in his reflections on the grand style in Nietzsche.(19)

To see the roots of the unfolding power of the saving power requires another still more conscientious invocation of questioning as questioning. Here Heidegger asks the question of essence once again. If the saving power roots and thrives in the essence of technology (29), that is, in the extreme danger, then, for Heidegger, the idea of essence must be heard in a sense consonant with such a confounding possibility. The essential character of Ge-stell is not the what of all things technological. Rather Ge-stell is a way of revealing. If poiesis in a broad sense has the same destining character as a bringing forth, the revealing characteristic of Ge-stell, as a destining or appointing, 'blocks poiesis.' This kind of essence Heidegger traces further to what endures as what is granted. And he catches himself up in this reflection, asking whether Ge-stell holds sway as a granting, or would it not rather be an egregious error to ask if what blocks bringing forth be yielded in itself? The difference between ordinary blundering and the stumbling of sudden insight is the sending upon a way of revealing intrinsic to destining. So sent along this way, a human being is exposed to a truth that is irrecusably aletheic. Thus, 'the coming to presence of technology gives man entry into That which, of himself, he can neither invent nor in any way make.' It is this that betrays and highlights the essential relationship of human being and truth — the sense in which it may be heard that 'there is no such thing as a man who, solely of himself, is only man.' It is in this co-respondent way that as 'needed and used, man is given to belong to the coming-to-pass of truth' (31).

The saving power Heidegger hears in Hölderlin 'lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence,' a dignity which has everything to do with the preservation of things in their fullness in both what is shown and concealed as oppposed to reducing things to their merely present-at-hand significance, a forbearance which would also hold binding for the technological imperative of the Ge-stell which reduces everything to mere resources on call, for sustainable management or heedless exhaustion according to the whims of market and political sensibility as stock and reserve.

This is 'the irresistability of ordering and the restraint of the saving power' in a constellation of occlusion and convergence. Thus the question posed in the wake or orbit of technology is 'the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass' (33). If we see the growth of the saving power, this does not mean that anything is altered. Through this, as Heidegger says, again echoing Nietzsche, ' we are not yet saved.' But we are called to hope for what Heidegger leaves as all too little to satisfy his critics, a paucity he calls by name. What can save us is not a god, as he will say in his later Spiegel interview, but only and exactly the care of small things, and perhaps it is only such a care that is divine. What can save us is no more than that very little which can yet be done, and can be here and now. These small things foster the power to save that grows in the danger of the ordering set up that absorbs every revealing, wherein everything that is from sheep to spare hearts and extra organs like the extra buttons included with a new pair of trousers, 'will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing reserve.' Human reflection is called to see not the growth of the saving power as the promise of a remedy or a redemption but rather as what calls for thinking, as question worthy. This call turns thought to the relationship between techne, poiesis, and piety. The relationship reflects antiquity and the dawn of art. For Heidegger beyond the awful threat of the closing danger of frenzied ordering, essential reflection on technology may find its way to the essence of technology which is itself nothing technological but the realm of art. And art can do this, not of itself, but only in the questioning that is the piety of thought, not because we speak when we dwell poetically but because in the poetic word, we are spoken by language.

The way Charles Taylor reads Heidegger on language is significant here. For Taylor, Heidegger's weakness (if not, to paraphrase Lacoue-Labarthe, his mistake and if an accident by no means whatever) lay not in his surrender to the event of Western planetary technology, but rather in his use of language, a use we can only see as we can only glance backwards, as fraught with blindness. For Taylor, 'Heidegger is' nevertheless 'on to something very important, a power of words that enframing theories can make no sense of.'(20) But if these words of power have 'positive' uses, they have also 'terrifyingly dangerous ones.' And Heidegger, for Taylor, 'is typically aware only of the former. The danger comes from the fact that much can be retrieved from the grey zone of forgetfulness. ... Hitler was a world-historical genius in only one respect, but that was in finding such dark words of power, sayings that could capture and elevate the fears, longings and hatreds of a people into something demonic.' There is no place 'for the retrieval of evil' in Heidegger's system, and here Taylor agrees with Levinas. But this points to a more Gadamerian assertion of philosophical incompetence than a Levinasian conviction of complicity by sheer association with that same evil. Taylor qualifies his own critique in the direction of the open, responsive reflection which is the essence of what questioning can become. Thus properly understood, 'the "shepherd of Being" can't be an adept of triumphalist instrumental reason.'(21) The same incapacity endures as the ongoing virtue of Heidegger's attention to 'little things' and to what can be done 'here and now.' 'There is no such thing as a man who, solely of himself, is only man' (Q 31). This is the genuine and thoughtworthy force of the Seinsfrage as a question for the renewal of philosophy, which moves beyond philosophy to thought and grace.

For Reiner Schürmann, who thought himself less the kind of aletheiological detective than Heidegger's ordinary readers claim to be, Heidegger is not the thinker of Being so much as the thinker of the tragic condition of being, as attested by the Beiträge, and where the 'spreading uniformity' of modern technics may be seen as the latest 'hegemonic offspring' of metaphysics, where its faltering, numbing influence represents 'the hubris that is the very essence of metaphysical posits.'(22) Both the Seinsfrage and Die Frage nach der Technik must be traced to double binds, to bifrontal efficacy.

From Taylor's attention to Heidegger's dark words of power to Schürmann's attention to the bifrontality of tragic thought in general, we can reprise the final question of the question concerning technology as the question of danger. If Heidegger is wrong about the danger to aletheic truth and the correspondent awful locus for the growth of the saving power, we can ignore this unsettling coordination of danger and grace, and perhaps undertake to reform the ordinary dangers of technology as risks to be managed and if we succeed at least at that, thereby save save ourselves. We can take the place of God that Sartre descried at the heart of modern technicity and which same desire speaks with a different tone in the redemptive vision of critical theory. But even a masked theist like Descartes can refute Sartre. It is an easy if a cheap chessplayer's gambit to prove God's necessity, qua creator/preserver, with the consumately human or exactly finite limit of self-preservation. We are not able to hold ourselves in being by our own will, however much, and this is the visionary ambition of instrumental rationality, we do wish to do exactly that.

Reprising Questioning After Technology, Thinking, and Danger

Heidegger began his Question Concerning Technology, by reflecting on his own project of questioning concerning or after technology. If questioning technology 'builds a way,' so too so does every other kind of questioning, both technico-problematical and sense-directed or re-flective questions.(23) The way of questioning will be re-flective if we actually follow through or it makes its way our own so that instead of the forcing advance characteristic of research or instrumental investigation we allow ourselves to follow the path where it takes us.

To the extent that questioning is intrinsically theoretical, one can say that such problematical questioning is pre-reflective or even inauthentic and so not the genuine questioning or open adventure of thought that can become what Heidegger names 'simply saying.' For this reason, a retrieve of the question is necessary for the sake of the authentic project of the questioning which attends as such a saying (Cf SZ 9).(24) What Heidegger calls 'the possible dimensions of appropriate questioning' must (he implied) be disentangled for the sake of any possible relation to the kind of questioning that instead of being guided by its anticipation, can be open to what is sought.(25)

If I have sought to reflect on the transformation of the question in the wake of technology that is because a kind questioning belongs to the essence of technique. This is problematical, techno-practical or instrumental questioning. The transformation of the question in the wake of technology does not turn the nature of questioning against itself but exactly as the danger that works as supreme in the essence of technology it turns questioning into itself.

I have emphasized the distinction to be made between problematical, investigative questioning and reflective, responsive questioning. In its long incarnation between science and love, philosophy can be absorbed in either kind of questioning. Problematical questioning is the question that has (as all questioning has), its cue in advance but keeps this cue as its only solution. Reflective questioning takes its point of departure from 'that which is to be found out by the asking,'(26) but it does not push the anticipatory question to its conventional satisfaction. In the open disposition of reflective thought 'the true stance of thinking cannot be to put questions, but must be to listen to that which our questioning vouchsafes' (NL 72), that is, to reflect or think in the open possibility of its own seeking..

If Heidegger in 'The Question Concerning Technology' ends with a reference to questioning as the piety of thought, this same piety leads to simply saying. This is the soundless gathering call by which Saying moves the world-relation on its way' (NL 108). As call that calls without a caller, the saying that Says without a Sayer, the echo of silence is the poetic touchstone: 'the breaking up of the word.' And it is in the sense that we might hear the conclusion of 'Science and Reflection' where Heidegger, at once esoteric, mysterious, frustrating, as gelassen as only Heidegger can be, reflects upon nothing so much as piety and thought but simplicity instead, as if we were dealing with — as Schürmann suggests we have in Heidegger inevitably to do with — Meister Eckhart or Angelus Silesius rather than a beleaguered leading thinker of the twentieth century. In addition to his scholastic proto-priestly origins, Heidegger was also sophisticated enough to understand logic and categorical doctrines or formal structure and savvy enought to take modern science at its own word on its own importance. For this reason at least, Heidegger could have been on intimate terms with Heisenberg, the one physicist who demonstrated the intrinsic (that is: the essential) technicity of all physical science, which is the reason Heisenberg claimed, and he could have been Nietzsche in so claiming this, that in science, everywhere man encounters only himself. Nevertheless, beyond all query, beyond the world of scientific truth, at the end, Heidegger suggests a questioning beyond technique that can, in response, become simply saying. Such simple saying I have already noted brings us to poetry as the breaking word.

It is also the only true questioning that remains, as questioning, after technology. Technological questioning, questioning cannot be named the piety of thought because it is exactly not open to any insight into what is, and hence is not at all a simple saying but already prescribed, honed to an answer in advance of itself. Questioning today, in the wake of technology, persists as a questioning keyed to answer in advance of itself. We do not need the whole logic or order of Heidegger's articulation of questioning to name this question inauthentic. We do not need to recognize the aletheiological character of truth or to see the reductive element in calculation. But this reduction points to what is excluded in calculative or techno-scientific thinking. The simplicity that holds questioning open and thereby breaks the chain or cadence of question and answer brings questioning back to itself as the philosophic opening of thought.

It is the poetic word that takes the step back to what would be another beginning, another kind of questioning, not only for but also and for the first time beyond philosophy. Where for Hölderlin, it will be the poets who build 'what endures,' humanity, for Heidegger, finds its first access to a dwelling on earth, both humane and divine through poetic measure and corresponding to what Heidegger, echoing Hölderlin, names with the Greek word charis: the grace of the heart, the kindness of the saving god.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984, p. 214.

2. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 216.

3. See Reiner Schürmann, 'A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being: On Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie,' trans. Kathleen Blamey in Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994). See too, Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine Marie-Gros (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

4. 'Reflection is needed as a responding that forgets itself in the clarity of ceaseless questioning away at the inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning — of That from out of which, in the moment properly its own, responding loses the character of questioning and becomes simply saying.' Martin Heidegger, 'Science and Reflection' in W. Lovitt, trans. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 182. Henceforth 'The Question Concerning Technology' is cited as QT in the text; 'The Age of the World Picture' as WP; and 'Science and Reflection' as SR.

5. Jean Ladrière, Les Enjeux de la rationalité (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1977), p. 71. cited by Dominque Janicaud, Powers of the Rational, trans. Peg and Elizabeth Birmingham (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 58.

6. Lingis discusses the matter of eros and automobiles in a number of places. For the phenomenologically relevant account of embodied bodily equipment, see Alphonso Lingis, "Heidegger's Conception of the Technological Imperative: A Critique," in Babich, Babette & Debra Bergoffen & Simon Glynn, eds., Contemporary and Postmodern Approaches to the Philosophy of Science. (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), pp. 227-245; see particularly 240-242.

7. Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983)

8. See Ihde's many books, particularly Existential Technics (Albany: State University of New York, 1983) and Instrumental Realism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). See also Carl Mitcham ...

9. Heidegger, Vier Seminare (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), pp. 107-8. Translated by and cited in Joan Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 34.

10. Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology' in W. Lovitt, trans. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 3. Henceforth cited as QT in the text.

11. See Tiles and xxx on the historically entrenched collusion between financial incentives and genetic agri-research and the impact of this collusion on the very shape of the science (beyond designer tomatos) and very insightfully on the human genome project, R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, (New York: Harper & Row: 1991).

12. For the radical (if rather nonhermeneutic) cclaim that Heidegger was exactly guilty of murder see John D. Caputo, "...." in Babich, ed., From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, along with further references to the ACPA conference publication of the ensuing debate.

13. Emmanuel Levinas, "As If Consenting to Horror," Critical Inquiry, 15/2 (1989): 485-488. Pro-Levinasian perspectives arewell known, from Caputo to Sheehan to Bernasconi. But Victor Farías was the occasion for the most decisive reading of the explicitly Nazi and presumptively Holocaust-tolerant aspect in Heidegger's thought. For my argument on the ethical issues in this issue, please see "Heidegger's Silence: Towards a Post-Modern Topology." Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger: Currents in Continental Thought. Albany. State University of New York Press. 1992. Pp. 83-106 and "From the Ethical Alpha to the Linguistic Omega: Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and the Question of the Affinity Between Ancient Greek and German." Joyful Wisdom: A Journal of Postmodern Ethics. I/1:3-25. Fall 1994.

14. Tom Rockmore neatly summarizes no less than seven defects — which he enumerates as a American college instructor might grade an undergraduate essay. In his book, the title of which reflects the agenda for any contemporary reading of Heidegger and technology, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) Heidegger doesn't distinguish between technologies. They are all the same. Second, Hedegger fails to prove his non-anthropological thesis of technology. Third, Heidegger fails to mark the connections between his theory of technoloqy (qua authentic) and everybody else's (i.e., Marx's theory of technology as a philosophical anthropology). Fourth, Heidegger's 'effort to show the plausibility of his interpretation of technology as disclosure' is 'weak' based only fragile etymological associations between techne, Technik, Geschick, Geschichte and Schickung. Strangely, Rockmore leaves Ge-stell out of the list, concentrating instead on the connection between destiny and mode (i,e., what he calls the quality of being chic' [236]). Fifth, Heidegger is 'overly abstract.' Sixth, Heidegger's analysis of the relation between technology and applied science is inadequate (Here Rockmore has failed to do his own homework, where technology studies are now more or less agreed on the hybrid term technoscience where the historical inadequacies of the distinction between technology and applied science depend upon a less and less persuasive distinction between pure and applied science or indeed pure and applied anything.) In the seventh and most apocalyptic place, Heidegger's understanding of technology is incompatible with a commitment to democracy, democratic values, and what is called the democratic way of life.' (237) There follows an ad hominem proof of this intellectual or theoretical dissonance.

15. Thus he can write: 'Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature.' (QT, 21) The theory is already an application, a disposition, a rendering. 'Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.' (21)

16. See my essay, "The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: On the Mismatch of Physics and Cultural Criticism." Common Knowledge. 6/2:23-33. September 1997.

17. "'Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy; everything in the demigod's sphere turns to satyr-play; and everything in god's sphere turns to ... to what? 'world' perhaps?' Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 150, cited by Heidegger, Nietzsche I (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961) p. 255.

18. "The Musical Style of Philosophy: From Socrates' Practice to Heidegger's Parataxis" in Robert Burch and Massimo Verdicchio, eds., Gesture and Word: Thinking Between Philosophy and Poetry (Northwestern University Press: Forthcoming).

19. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, pp. 151-152. And so man grows out of everything that once constricted him. He does not need to break the fetters; without a hint, when a god beckons, they fall away. And where is the ring that ultimately embraces him? Is it the world? Is it God?' (260). This ringed conception of the thought of Eternal Recurrence is the youthful Nietzsche's vision of the yoke that encircles growth, the encircling bond broken as if mortal humanity underwent a metamorphosis or shed its skin.

20. Charles Taylor, 'Heidegger, Language, and Ecology: in H. Dreyfus and H. Hall, ed., Heidegger: A Critical Reader, (London: Blackwell, 1992), p. 266.

21. Taylor, p. 267.

22. Schürmann, 'A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being,' in Harries, ed., p. 90.

23. 'Every seeking is guided beforehand from what is sought' (SZ 5) in this sense questioning is a 'knowing search for beings' conceived in their whatness and thatness. Thus questioning is already underway to the technical meaning of investigation: 'the revealing determination of what the question aims at.' Such defined and conceptualized questioning corresponds in particular to the theoretical question. Thus 'what is really intended, what is to be ascertained lies in what is questioned.' Thus questioning arrives at its goal.

24. This in turn presupposes the thoughtful questioners 'in love with the abyss,' in Heidegger's Beiträge and like the passion of Nietzsche's tragic knower. (BzP 13)

25. This is the provocatively obscure, notorious Gegend in two senses, that is the range of thought of the later Heidegger. In 'Conversation along a Country Path' ('Feldweggespräch'), Heidegger reflects the sense of Gegend as the 'free range' (die freie Weite) that remains a topical focus, an opening which surrounds us (das umgebende Offfene), in which 'country' we are countered by, we encounter what is — encounter (Gegnet) what is not as objects for use or theory but corresponding existent things beyond representative, instrumental rationality. Beyond the subject, beyond humanism, 'rules the withdrawal (the refusal) of Being, Being as withdrawal.' (Beiträge, 239)

26. Heidegger, 'On the Nature of Language' in On the Nature of Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 75.